Josh Wieder

Over the past few days I've been working on a project that involved building an authentication mechanism for a new website which checks user logins against a WHMCS admin database. There are a variety of options for authenticating normal, non-admin WHMCS users: on the easy side of things, you can simply use the WHMCS API's validatelogin() call, or for a more advanced project its possible to implement OAuth within your WHMCS instance . For my project, neither LDAP nor Active Directory were options. I was surprised to find that the WHMCS API did not contain a mechanism for authenticating admin users. I'm somewhat sympathetic given the security implications: WHMCS is a billing application and it should not be used to provide a sortof infrastructure authentication backbone, particularly given the many much more mature options available for this sort of thing. With that said, this project wasn't about looking to turn WHMCS into LDAP ... it was about allowing WHMCS admin t...

Getting the hang of Linux file-system permissions can be tricky for beginners. I still have problems every now and again translating symbolic permission notation to octal permission notation and back again. One common scenario which can be complicated to enact in practice is the creation of default permissions for files inside of given directories. Although not a direct translation, in Windows this sort of functionality is usually implemented by selecting the "Allow propagation on child objects" setting when viewing Security Properties for a directory. But how to get this done in Linux? The preferred approach is the use of Access Control Lists using setfacl . Since Linux kernel 2.6, the acl flag is enabled by default with most standard filesystems. There's already several solid explanations for how to use Linux ACLs . But, there are scenarios in which this can be difficult or impossible to implement; using exotic filesystems or older kernels, etc. Or you just might find...